You showed up ahead of schedule today — you’ve got a tight deadline looming. As noon nears, your stomach knots and cramps, sending you waves of discomfort.
Gazing at the lonely banana on the edge of your desk, you think, “This won’t do.”
Suddenly your abdomen roars so loudly your colleague on the right shoots you a disapproving glance. A cold sweat breaks out across your skin.
Within moments you make a desperate sprint toward the office kitchenette.
You picture the scrumptious leftover baked ziti waiting inside your container, mouth watering. That ziti is a microwaveable escape from your dusty cubicle, if only for the brief reprieve of your lunch hour.
You fling open the fridge, ready to reclaim your food. This morning you even drew a heart beside your name on the container with a black Sharpie.
But the doodled heart didn’t protect your meal. After searching every shelf and cranny of the fridge, you discover your dish is gone.
It has vanished — once again — at the hands of the Office Lunch Thief.
Farewell, cherished baked ziti.
Survey Finds 18% of Co-Workers Confess to Taking Lunches
Maybe this is something you’ve experienced occasionally — or perhaps it’s happened repeatedly, depending on your workplace.
If that’s the case, you’re far from alone.
A survey by American Express OPEN polled more than 1,000 employees and revealed that 18% admitted to pilfering a colleague’s lunch from the communal fridge.
The figures are disconcerting. As you read this, you might be scanning the office, mentally ranking who’s trustworthy and who isn’t.
“To realize that nearly one in five teammates are capable of swiping someone’s lunch is disturbing,” says Alex Mahadevan, data journalist at Savinly. The Office Lunch Thief is affecting more than meal plans — they’re hitting your wallet too. CNBC reports that a co-worker stealing your lunch can cost you significantly. Beyond losing the average $6.30 worth of groceries in a missing lunch, you’ll likely pay an average $11.14 for a replacement takeout meal. If the Office Lunch Thief nabbed one of your lunches each month for a year, you’d be out roughly $210 in total, CNBC notes.
I don’t know about you, but that’s the sort of money leakage that makes me feel like this:
How Should We Handle Office Lunch Thieves?
Why does this happen? Are people taking lunches because they’re desperate? Hungry? The survey doesn’t clarify. But online discussions offer some theories. NPR suggests many do it out of hunger — and some rationalize it as borrowing rather than stealing. Another explanation is a sense of entitlement to items in the communal fridge.
But when you tally the hundreds of dollars lost to clandestine lunch snatching, action seems necessary. “Maybe we should force them to wear a sandwich board that reads ‘I STEAL LUNCHES’ by the fridge at lunchtime for a week,” Mahadevan jokes. Lisa Rowan, writer and producer at Savinly, offers a more practical stance and recommends banning Office Lunch Thieves from the communal fridge entirely.
If you’re the person taking lunches, take note: chances are people aren’t fond of you.
Not sure how to prepare your own packed lunch? Here are some tips on how to bring healthy meals to work. For everyone else, it may be time to invest in locks for your lunch containers.
